This was a really weird one. A client’s application suddenly suffered from this error in all environments simultaneously. The root cause had nothing at all to do with K2 blackpearl, but it affected the service keys of the instance of a service, which brought down the service and caused the exception.

Symptoms

• Error prompt reading “There is no such object on the server.”
• After closing the prompt, certain objects appear unpopulated and/or in an error state

Cause

A configuration problem on the service object, perhaps as a function of an action unrelated to K2.

Details

In this particular instance, the object affected was associated with a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) service instance. The root cause was determined to be that one of the domains in the company organization had been deleted by network engineering (a scheduled event).

This had the effect of invalidating the LDAP Service Key which (still) included the domain in its list, and of invalidating the NETBIOSNAME Service Key, which (still) had the bad domain component in its list.

The invalid service keys had the net effect of disabling the service instance entirely, thereby producing the strange “There is no such object on the server” prompt.

Once the bad domain was removed from the LDAP Service Key, the bad domain component was removed from the NETBIOSNAME Service Key, and the Service Instance was refreshed, the AD instance was back in service, and the dependent SmartObject began functioning again.